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How to become an
Art Director
What is an Art Director?
The art director, or creative director, is a communications professional and creative person who shapes the visual appearance of an advertisement, magazine, book or digital campaign.
The art director is the one who oversees the work, from scrap, proposing a vision that communicates a message and achieves an intended goal in the least obvious and most creative way possible.
What does an Art Director do?
The art director develops creative projects and ideas that he or she must know how to communicate in an original, effective and creative way, synthesizing thoughts and words into concepts that are easy to understand. He or she must know how to visualize proposals with storyboard sketches, present the project to the client, rationalizing his/her approach and finding the most effective argument, lead a team of professionals (graphic designers, photographers, illustrators, film makers) and collaborate in the preparation and production.
What skills do you need to be an art director?
A good art director must have imagination, creativity, curiosity, a sense of aesthetics, and technical skills such as drawing. It facilitates if he or she has a talent for observation and intuition.
Technical versatility and artistic talents are combined; he or she must be up to date and able to grasp developments and trends with a fundamental knowledge of production processes in addition to the main graphic design and editing software.
How to become an Art Director?
To become an art director you need to stimulate and cultivate the creativity that is in-built in all of us. You have to train it, learn how to get it out, manage it and always adapt it to new requests and new challenges. You need to be curious, explore at 360 degrees, look around, ask yourself a thousand questions and find unexpected solutions to new and different problems. You need to be able to communicate, to do it in an original way, identifying with everything and everyone. You need to be able to capture details and nuances where others fail, turning them into ideas.
All this can be done through an in-depth study of contemporary communication, a solid design methodology and a good technical preparation, such as that offered by NABA’s study programmes offered in the area of Communication and Graphic Design.
- Graphic Design and Art Direction (Bachelor of Arts)
- Creative Advertising (Academic Master)